An investigation into how legislators have taken advantage of their positions—and of weak financial disclosure laws—to make millions.After a historic financial crisis led Congress to unprecedented economic intervention, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post began an investigation that pierced the secrecy of the deeply flawed financial disclosure system that governs the 535 men and women who draft the nation's laws.Members of Congress directed millions ...

The Nobel Prize winner offers "an ideal introduction to the theories of special and general relativity" in clear, comprehensible language ( Nature ).A renowned mathematician and philosopher , and as well as recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bertrand Russell was acclaimed for his ability to address complex subjects in accessible ways. In this classic reference book, Russell delve...

"Traces the history of abolition from the 1600s to the 1860s . . . a valuable addition to our understanding of the role of race and racism in America."— Florida CourierReceived historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radic...

The award-winning science writer "packs a lot of learning into a deceptively light and enjoyable read" exploring the contentious history of the black hole ( New Scientist).For more than half a century, physicists and astronomers engaged in heated dispute over the possibility of black holes in the universe. The strange notion of a space-time abyss from which not even light escapes seemed to confound all logic. Now Marcia Bartusiak, author of Einstein's U...

A lively, accessible, and timely guide to Marxist economics for those who want to understand and dismantle the world of the 1%.Economists regularly promote Capitalism as the greatest system ever to grace the planet. With the same breath, they implore us to leave the job of understanding the magical powers of the market to the "experts."Despite the efforts of these mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many of us have begun to question why this sys...

Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "[A] beautifully conceived and penetrating book . . . one of the finest studies of American slavery ever written."— The New RepublicPublished some thirty years ago, Robert Manson Myers's Children of Pride: The True Story of Georgia and the Civil War won the National Book Award in history and went on to become a classic reference on America's slaveholding South. That book presented the letters of the prominent Presbyte...

Declassified explores some of the most remarkable revelations to have emerged from top secret documents brought to light in recent years. It ranges from revelations of spies and sleeper agents, such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to the frankly bizarre Acoustic Kitty project, in which the US government trained cats to spy on the Kremlin, to the murky tale of the 'disappeared' citizens during Argentina's military dictatorship.In this book, the author explores these remarkab...

This dramatic social history follows the struggle for women's rights in England from the Industrial Revolution to the Suffragist victory after WWI.The 100 years from 1819-1919 saw remarkable change for women in England. From the early nineteenth century, when women were not even considered 'persons' under the law, they achieved full legal rights and status. The doors of education and employment were thrown open to them, and by 1919, they won universal suffrage.

The shocking and significant story of how the White House and Pentagon scuttled an epic Hollywood production.Soon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon.Over at Paramount, Hal B. Wallis was ramping up his own film v...

At what point in time does a memory exist?Set in the coastal Pacific Northwest in 1994, Afterglow is a mind-bending psychological journey that follows Edyn, a troubled 32-year-old man who remembers nothing before three years ago except for a haunting vision atop a grassy hill, where a mysterious woman speaks her last words.As the fragments of Edyn's hidden memories are unlocked, disturbing new flashbacks break through; glimpses of a ruined world th...

The dropping of two atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their shocking aftermath finally ended World War II in the eastern theatre. But they weren't the only experimental weaponry at the time.In this fascinating account, Chris McNab examines the development of a range of hitherto unknown and at times shockingly effective weapons that were developed and unleashed on an unsuspecting world over the course of the war.They include the bouncing bomb, t...

The legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur examines how both business and government organizations can harness the power of disruptive technologies.Tom Siebel, the billionaire technologist and founder of Siebel Systems, discusses how four technologies—elastic cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things—are fundamentally changing how business and government will operate in the 21st century. While this profound and fast-moving transf...